Mon.itor.us, a free service that monitors the availability of your web server, now sends weekly PDF reports on the uptime of your websites. The report provides a snapshot of the availability of your site within the week. The weekly PDF report seemed a recent addition to its already formidable lineup of services. This is still the second time I’ve received one.

PDF REPORT. Mon.itor.us sends a weekly report on the availability of servers you are monitoring. Click on image to enlarge.

Of course, you can always go to your mon.itor.us account to view detailed statistics not only on your web server availability but also on response times. Mon.itor.us monitors web server performance from three different locations—Germany, Austria, and the United States.

Of all the free web server monitoring services I tried, mon.itor.us is the most consistent and dependable. It’s is usually the first to alert me whenever any of the sites I monitor is down. This means mon.itor.us checks availability more frequently than the other services.

Mon.itor.us also provides its users detailed records of the response times of web servers. You can view the response time of your site, from which country and on what hour of any given day since you signed up for its service.

Media Temple, in the first days after launching its widely-hyped GridServer hosting, seemed to deliver on its grandiose 100% uptime promise. The figures I was getting in early monitoring of Media Temple uptime, and a host of other web hosting services, was tempting me to sign up with them for a project that was still at an early stage.

I’ve since changed my mind. I will be using my current web host, the dependable A Small Orange, for the new project. MediaTemple has apparently failed to sustain its 100% availability, based on my monitoring using mon.itor.us and the posts of scores of its own customers. The downtime was significant that it generated an article in Netcraft.

And even if it got good http uptime performance for several days, there were a lot of complaints regarding Media Temple’s database connections, a huge issue for those that depend on PHP/MySQL scripts, such as WordPress, to run their websites.

Media Temple’s promise of 100% uptime with their Grid-Server hosting may sound too good to be true.

I initially thought that it’s chief executive officer’s statement that they are actually considering paying customers, on top of granting them rebates, whenever there is a downtime as coming close to a boast.

I know better now. The 100% server uptime is true.

No, I’m not hosted with Media Temple, yet — although I’m considering a transfer to the Grid-Server — but I’ve been monitoring an account hosted with their servers. When I read about the Grid-Server offering, I searched for a website hosted with them so that I could monitor that site using mon.itor.us, a tool I wrote about earlier.

I listened to Michael Arrington’s podcast interview of the guys behind Media Temple last night and their new shared hosting product piqued my interest. If it fulfills even just 80 percent of what the guys behind the service promised then it will be a phenomenal development in the web service industry.

The new product, the Grid-Server, turns the shared hosting services on its head and the Media Temple guys are so gung-ho over the service its chief executive officer said during the interview they’d soon have a 101 percent uptime guarantee where they’d actually pay customers, on top of not charging them for the entire duration of the outage, when they experience a downtime.

The Grid-Server has a different architecture than most current shared hosting plans.